Religious Studies

The history evidences: the Local Churches that were historically associated with earthly empires were uninterested in the canonical establishment of local churches under their jurisdictions, and therefore usually granted autocephaly to churches only under the pressure of historic circumstances. No exception is the Moscow Patriarchate, which has incorporated the Orthodox Church in Ukraine since 1686.

Ukrainian Orthodoxy and Ukrainian society suffer from division. The majority of Ukrainian Orthodox believers belong to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate. The rest of the Orthodox community of Ukraine has chosen a different path of self-proclaimed autocephaly. However, neither the first nor the second path is optimal for the Orthodox Church in Ukraine to date.

Council of UAOC Formulates Its Position on Participation in Election Campaign

The Hierarchical Council of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC) called priests and bishops to abstain from any agitation and participation in the election campaign.

“We decided to prohibit priests and bishops from running in the election, agitating for any parties or individual persons. And we called lay people to vote according to their conscience for there are decent people in all the parties,” the head of UAOC, Metropolitan Mefodii (Kudriakov), said to a correspondent of Komersant.

Similar decisions were earlier made by other Ukrainian churches, namely, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate, Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kyivan Patriarchate and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.

On September 11 in Kyiv, a regular session of the Hierarchical Council of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC) began.